Arrant falsehood.
Crumpling the letter in my pocket, I wandered through the streets of Waltham, watching women hoist babies out of perambulators, plug their mouths with bottles. I might turn into a thousand things – who could tell? But I couldn’t live my life according to what I might be, or might want. I was myself, now. And he was here, now. A man who wouldn’t just hold me and kiss me, but a man I could say anything to and be understood, a man who could open the world to me with his heart and mind. How many women had that? Didn’t he realize what we could be, together?
I tried in vain to swallow a great hot lump in my throat. Stupid, stupid man.
The following morning I inserted a fresh sheet of paper into the roller and began to type. My eyes were smarting, the keys of my machine spattering the letters onto the page.
Dear Mr Parr. Thank you for your note of Wednesday last. It will probably gratify you to know that I am at present walking out with a Mr Robert Coward, a bookkeeper at the town hall. His name does not suit him and might better be adopted by another of my acquaintance. Yours sincerely, Ellen Calvert.
I then hammered Mr S. Parr, Esq., Parr’s Mill, Upton, Nr Waltham, Hampshire onto an envelope and sealed the letter inside, and thrust it into the typing-pool mail sack with a single loud tearless sob that went unnoticed in the din.
I had not lied. One of my fellows, Polly, had asked me to make a four with her and two young clerks, Tom Dallimore and Bob Coward, at Bishop’s on Saturday afternoon. I’d willingly have paid a high price to go to another tea room but Polly refused the notion. ‘It’s so clean in Bishop’s. All those virginal lace doilies. It gives a tremendously good impression. And Mrs B is quite the chaperone, should a boy lean too close. The moment you feel his breath on your neck she appears soundlessly at your table. Perhaps she runs on castors.’
She was a witty girl, if not wholly likeable.
We had tea. I answered Bob’s compendious list of questions and watched Polly eat Tom alive. We could rob a bank this afternoon, I thought, as long as Polly was in charge. She’d just make Tom do it, and he’d go to jail with the same enraptured smile on his face. Bob was a stringy boy with too much of the looks of Selwyn and none of his mind. As the afternoon wound to an end I excused myself, saying that I had to pop into Priddy’s for a tart for Sunday. I’d go to Lucy and Mrs Horne as usual, for my Sunday dinner, though I might excuse myself from church.
The air was fresh, rinsed with recently fallen rain, and there were rough, uncertain patches of blue in the sky. Water lapped the cobbles in the lowest corner of the square. It was on a day like this, one after rain, that I had hurried towards the town hall in Patricia Harper’s shoes, late, full of hope.
Selwyn was coming towards me across the cobbles. His glasses were misted. Had he even seen me? But then he gave a shaken smile. ‘Ellen. I was making my way to find you.’
I put out my hands and he took them tightly.
‘Robert Coward shall not have you. I can’t bear it.’
I stepped back, my hands still in his, my arms extended. ‘Don’t I have a say?’
‘Beautiful Ellen. I love you.’ He was laughing, and so was I.
In the street we embraced. My head lay comfortably against his shoulder. I was a tall girl. His hand was deliciously heavy on the back of my head, my shoulders, my back. I shut my eyes and the cobbles pressed through the thin soles of my shoes.
Lucy scraped a spoon round the pie dish and stuck it in her mouth. A moment’s noisy sucking followed. ‘I just wanted to get the most out of it,’ she said. ‘We shan’t see another one of these for many a long year.’
‘How rude,’ said Mrs Horne.
‘Lucy, honestly. I don’t have to work in Waltham to bring you pies.’ I laughed. I had to laugh every so often, to release the sparkling happiness that brimmed inside me.
Lucy’s father George rose to his feet. ‘Miss Calvert. Let me offer you my congratulations.’ He held out his hand and I got up too, and shook it.
‘Thank you, Mr Horne.’
He turned and left the room. I saw his back bend outside the window. He was putting on his boots to go up to the kennels.
‘Go on, Nan,’ said Lucy. ‘Into the parlour with you.’
Lucy and I cleared the table. I put on the apron that Mrs Horne called ‘Ellen’s pinny’, a long, starched affair rejected by her and Lucy because the hem brushed their toes. I began washing the cutlery. Lucy leaned against the drainer and tugged the knives and spoons from my hands to dry them. Something about the way she placed them carefully, one by one, into their slots in the drawer, glancing up at me all the while, caught my attention.
‘What is it, Lucy?’
‘I don’t know if I should say this, Ell.’
‘You’re not usually so hesitant.’ I smiled at her. ‘Spit it out.’
‘All right. You know Ivy Sutton, who cleans for Dr Bell? She told me something about your Mr Parr. She didn’t mean to overhear but she was polishing the brass plate on the surgery door.’
‘And the keyhole too, I expect. So what did she overhear?’
‘She said …’ Lucy cleared her throat. ‘She said Mr Parr can’t do it. Because of the war. The war affected his, you know. His private parts.’ Her eyes shone black with embarrassment. ‘I’m only thinking of you, dear. That’s the only reason I’m repeatin this.’
I slid our dinner plates into the sink and let my hands rest on them, pleasantly gloved by the hot water. ‘I already know, Lucy.’
‘So it’s true?’ She gaped. ‘So it’ll be just … just room and board?’
I laughed aloud, that the riches which had poured into my lap could be termed so. ‘Oh, Lucy. Would you like to be my bridesmaid?’
*
Selwyn and I would wait half a year or so. He needed to let me be sure. He would never hold it against me if I reconsidered. I grew more certain every day that we spent together, walking in the beech hangers and the high tops of the Downs, or motoring to the sea, or reading in his sitting room, me with my hair down around my shoulders and my bare feet propped on the low table, and he looking up from his book and smiling at me. And all the while the small diamond burned its quiet determined fire on my finger.
But it was 1939, and we couldn’t live isolated in our warm little nook. In the summer of that year people were still professing their great faith in Mr Chamberlain. He would save us from these growling warmongers. ‘You’re trusting the wrong person,’ Selwyn told them. ‘Your fate doesn’t lie with Mr Chamberlain but with Herr Hitler.’
And so it proved. We married shortly after the war broke out, in December, amid the turmoil of those early months. Our wedding took place at Waltham Town Hall, a stark building now in wartime, denuded of its railings, the tall windows criss-crossed with blast tape. Lucy attended as bridesmaid and her father and grandmother accompanied her. Daniel Corey came, in uniform: he had a two-day pass from Aldershot and he’d brought his new wife Marcy, Marcy Berry that was, whom I’d seen pushing Mr Babcock in his wheeled wicker chair. John Blunden came, and his father who had taken my things to the Absaloms and taken them away again. Polly and my other pals from the town hall. Mr and Miss Dawes. Some very distant female relatives of Selwyn’s, cousins of his late father, who looked sideways at Lady Brock’s lipstick. Lady Brock came with William Kennet who was astonishingly dapper in a suit once the property of Sir Michael, whose God had finally shown him mercy back in September, right at the beginning of the war.
I wore a white satin dress that fell to my ankles. I had made it myself on Lady Brock’s machine. For a veil I had my mother’s yard of Nottingham lace.